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While I’m more interested in incidental learning from video games, as opposed to teaching with them in more formal ways, I recently had the opportunity to go into a local school (through the STEM Ambassador programme) and try using Valve’s Portal 2 to teach Physics to a group of secondary school students.

The students were in year S2 (around 14 years old in Scottish schools) and were all girls: this was part of a ‘Girls into Physics’ event co-ordinated by the Institute of Physics. Such events are intended to help address the gender imbalance in Physics at all levels, from school through to university and into industry. The girls here were approaching the point where they must decide which subjects to pursue, and the event was designed to help ensure Physics is on that list of subjects.

My Portal 2 set-up. The projector would not have looked out of place in the game’s Aperture Laboratories.

The way the event ran was as follows. The students moved between demonstrators in groups of around 12 at 20 minute intervals. Aside from my own Portal set-up the event featured all sorts of interesting experiments and displays, each manned by suitably knowledgeable and enthusiastic demonstrators from the Institute of Physics and the STEM Ambassadors programme. I came prepared with an educational copy of Portal 2 already installed on my laptop and a lesson plan adapted from those offered by US-based Physics teacher Cameron Pittman on collisions, momentum, and oscillations (see http://physicswithportals.com). My laptop was plugged into an impressive-looking projector and I awaited my first group of students.

While I had prepared the exercise, built a custom ‘test chamber’ in which to conduct experiments, and become familiar with the editing tools that ship with the educational version of the game, I was nervous about my lack of a Physics background. When I say I lack a background in Physics, I mean to say I haven’t studied it for nearly 20 years and even then it was competing with Chemistry and Maths for the coveted title of My Most Hated Subject. These fears were not entirely unfounded.

A Portal 2 Companion Cube

Overall, the experience was fairly positive. Feedback from the students was good (they seemed to have fun, at least) but I have doubts about what the teachers thought of the endeavour. While I had crammed just enough Physics theory to get through the exercises, I feel I could have done more with a proper command of the subject. While 20 minutes seemed like a short amount of time to play with, both of my groups finished working through the lesson plan before time was up: a real Physics teacher could have used the few minutes that remained to ad lib a little, while I had essentially reached the limit of my knowledge of Science. As with most teaching, too, I think that I could have conveyed what little I did attempt to cover rather better if I had a deeper understanding of the material. You can almost always tell when a teacher is slightly winging it.

Another observation I would make is that my laptop and projector set-up was not ideal for a group activity of this sort. While the students for the most part were quite engaged with what was happening on screen, it was inevitable that those furthest from the keyboard and mouse would eventually feel somewhat disconnected. The more confident students were also able to dominate to some degree. We changed up who was ‘in the driving seat’ a number of times per session but in 20 minutes it is impossible to allow 12 people to get some hands-on time – especially when factoring in some time for each student to master the game’s controls. A better approach, hardware availability permitting, might be to have the students work on their own machines, probably in pairs. If I did something like this again, I’d probably also try and learn some more Physics in advance of the class or, better still, run it in collaboration with an actual physicist. Finally, while I did make the point that it took somebody with a grasp of STEM subjects like Physics and Maths to make a game like Portal 2 happen, I think I could make this point all the more convincingly if I allocated some time to talk about how these subjects relate to work in the video games industry. For example, a few words about the success of Kim Swift, lead designer on the original Portal, might be of particular interest to secondary school girls thinking about their subject choices.

The Smiths: not relevant to 14 year old girls in 2013?

An aside: my Portal 2 test chamber was entitled ‘Oscillate Wildly’. Turns out 2013’s 14 year old girls don’t pick up on references to The Smiths.

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Will Wright’s original SimCity (1989) and its isometric sequel, SimCity 2000 (1994), are perhaps the games that first made me consider the educational possibilities of my favourite pastime. The original SimCity I played somewhat vicariously over my Amiga-owning friend’s shoulder. SimCity 2000, however, I had all to myself and I played it for hours on end on our Mac at home. At school, my forward-thinking geography teacher also allowed me to install it on the department’s Mac. He could probably see the potential in it as a learning tool and certainly recognised that the game could engage the teenage me in a way that some of his colleagues could not. It was never going to find its way on to the curriculum, of course, but it was an exciting possibility for the future.

New Mattsville in 2013

The 2013 version of SimCity marks the return of a series which has lain dormant since the release of SimCity 4 in 2003 (excluding spin-offs such as the Nintendo DS version, the less successful SimCity Societies and the myriad versions of the wildly popular The Sims franchise). At its core, SimCity is exactly what the name implies: a city simulator, wherein you assume the role of major, albeit with some unconventional leanings towards omnipotence not usually associated with City Hall. It’s a kind of civic sandbox, featuring all the toys with which a budding mayor might expect to be able to play. While this new iteration introduces a steady stream of mayoral objectives, the game has traditionally set few fixed goals. Instead, the player is free to craft their city as they see fit: adjusting taxes, investing in public services, building essential infrastructure such as roads, and so on. Perhaps the most important tool in your repertoire is that which allows you to designate areas of your city as residential, commercial or industrial zones, determining what your citizens – known as Sims – can build there.

Tinkering with your city and watching it grow is strangely addictive stuff. Like its predecessors, SimCity offers feedback to the player in countless forms, from the often quite beautiful picture the game paints of your living, breathing city, to the multitude of tables, reports and graphs you can pull up on your city’s finances, crime levels, educational performance and other social statistics. All of these feedback mechanisms, coupled with the ability to play the game at your own pace – both in the literal sense (you can slow and speed up time) and in the sense that there’s no real need to gallop ahead and build a sprawling metropolis if you’d rather cultivate a bustling hamlet – encourage the player to set their own personal goals. Because there’s nobody telling you what to do or when to do it as in, say, a school classroom, the motivation to meet these goals is entirely intrinsic.

Downtown Mattsville

This new SimCity, however, makes one significant departure for the series: it is designed to be played online as a multiplayer experience. This is important for a number of reasons. First, of course, it introduces the prospect of a rather more extrinsic form of motivation: competition. Second, because the game insists on connecting to servers operated by the game’s publisher, EA, every time you play – even if you have no intention of interacting with other players – those servers have to be up-and-running. However, in the few days since the US launch of the game, and to a lesser extent in the hours since it was released in Europe, EA’s servers have not been up to the task. Thousands of disgruntled would-be mayors cannot play the game for which they just paid around £40, after a decade-long wait, simply because the servers are unable to cope with the volume of people attempting to log in. The publisher’s motivation for this arrangement (known as ‘digital rights management’, or DRM) is to protect against piracy. Their servers, as well as proving the ability to save your game to the ‘cloud’, and, apparently, crunching some of the complex numbers required by the city simulation, are also used to check your copy of the game is legitimate.

This debacle has overshadowed the launch of the game to such an extent that it is impossible to ignore in any review. The rights and wrongs of DRM are better covered elsewhere, but the situation raises some significant questions about the game’s suitability for use in a classroom. First, online connectivity requires EA’s Origin software to be installed and able to connect to the internet, introducing an additional hurdle for getting the game installed on a school, college or university network in the first place. Second, if the servers are down when you are scheduled to teach a SimCity-based class, that class isn’t going to happen. Of course, it’s likely that EA will have remedied the server situation by the time the game filters into classrooms but there is a larger question here: what happens when EA turns the servers off? As players of many of the same publisher’s sports titles will know, once those servers become unprofitable to run, or there’s a new version of the title they want to push, the server that facilitates online play is canned. So, whereas a school that invested in 30 copies of SimCity 4 a decade ago can still use that software, there’s every chance that the same will not apply to the new game in 2023.

This is something of a dilemma for educators considering SimCity as a potential learning tool. On the one hand, the game’s publishers are actively courting the educational market – apparently drawing inspiration from Valve’s seemingly more altruistic efforts with thephysics-based Portal 2 game – via the simcityedu.org website, which offers lesson plans and other resources to kick-start teaching around the game. On the other, how many schools or colleges can afford to invest in multiple copies of a game that may become unplayable at the publisher’s whim? One must also add to the equation the cost of purchasing suitable hardware – the new SimCity is beautifully realised, to be sure, but it requires modern technology to render all of that stunning detail in real time.

In the end, and bearing in mind it’s only been out a day or two, it’s fair to say that SimCity will almost certainly gobble up what little spare time I can muster, and I’ll quickly forget my objections to what I consider to be Draconian DRM measures. From a learning point-of-view, however, I’ve yet to see anything in the game that couldn’t be done to some degree in its considerably more affordable predecessor, if not the version I showed to my geography teacher nearly 20 years ago. Either of these is rather more likely to run on the average school’s computers, which in some cases might actually be 20 years old.

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Update: The GamerDNA version of the Bartle test is now offline, so I’ve implemented my own version here.

As part of my literature review, I am, inevitably, reading up on some of Richard Bartle’s work. Also inevitably, I became distracted by the prospect of taking the Bartle Test to determine which of the MUD co-creator’s four player types I most closely resemble. Turns out I am explorer at heart, with leanings towards being an achiever and something of a killer. In the context of multi-player games (and perhaps more generally!), I am not much of a socializer.

It’s not so much the wandering around and poking about, but that euphoric eureka moment the Explorer strives for. The joys of discovery do not necessarily involve geography, real or virtual. They may derive from the mental road less traveled, the uncovering of esoteric or hidden knowledge and it’s creative application. Explorers make great theory crafters. The most infinitesimal bit of newness can deliver the most delicious zing to an Explorer.

Secondary influences

Explorer Killers enjoy seeing the world, meeting interesting people…and killing them. EKs love all discovery, but finding an edge over the competition is best. Always seeking new opportunity, an EK likely knows the ten best places to find certain types of opponents, as well as ten different ways for taking them down.

Explorer Achievers have been there, done that and have the t-shirt…in fact they have a plethora of t-shirts, badges, trophies and other rewards. EAs are the completionists of the gamer world. They like to find new places, quests, easter eggs, unlocks, maps etc. and check them off as have, visited or beaten. Like real world travelers, EAs enjoy collecting memorabilia that helps them relive their experiences later.

Explorer Socializers are the glue of the online world. Not only do they like to delve in to find all the cool stuff, but they also enjoy sharing that knowledge with others. Explorer socializers power the wikis, maps, forums and theory craft sites of the gamer world.

The scarcity of women working in the games industry is all the more bizarre given that nearly half of gamers are actually women. Surely the industry would be better served by encouraging more women to come and work as developers, designers, producers and publicists? Weird.

Jo also flagged up UKIE’s Video Games Ambassadors Scheme, which sounds like an excellent idea, particularly if it can help encourage more girls to take games industry-related STEM subjects at school and beyond.

Digital games research is a young, growing, multidisciplinary field of study. It spans disciplines as diverse as arts, humanities, social sciences, psychology, design, computer science, engineering and others. This diversity and richness is part of its strength but also one of its challenges.

In order to gain insight into the views and needs of researchers working with/on digital games, three research organizations have joined hands to organize an international survey assessing the State of Digital Games Research.

– Digital Games Research Association (DiGRA), www.digra.org
– Digital Games Research Temporary Working Group of the European
Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), www.digital-games.eu
– Game Studies Special Interest Group of the International Communication Association (ICA), http://game.icahdq.org/

Are you conducting or have you conducted research with or on digital games, then please take time to fill out the survey which should not take more than 10-15 minutes and which can be found here:

It often seems as though the mainstream media (in this case Forbes) only feels comfortable covering video game culture if there’s a suitably mainstream angle to take, in this case the involvement of the increasingly irrelevant Sir Paul McCartney. What of the excellent (and, finally, award-winning) work of Jason Graves (BAFTA award winner, Dead Space), Akari Kaida (BAFTA award winner, Ōkami) and Jack Wall (BAFTA award nominee, Mass Effect 2)?

Nothing more to add. Really, I was just pleased with my Halo pun in the title. In lieu of any insightful analysis, I invite you to enjoy Still Alive, the brilliant song that accompanies the closing credits on Valve’s Portal (written by Jonathan Coulton and performed by Ellen McLain).

And, while we’re at it, here’s Want You Gone from the end of Portal 2.

This is the conclusion of respected games developer (and creator of indie favourite, Braid), Jonathan Blow, as revealed in this article in The Atlantic magazine. The article itself is interesting, featuring interviews with Blow himself – who has, in the past, been labelled somewhat pretentious (you can decide for yourself after reading the Atlantic piece) – and actually offers a more balanced take on the “video games as art” debate than the introductory blurb might suggest. The article also serves as a rather eloquent piece of promotional material for Blow’s upcoming exploration/puzzle game, The Witness…

In response to the arguments put forth in the article, however, The Brainy Gamer has undertaken to produce a catalogue of “smart games”, comprising those titles that meet Blow’s own criteria for being “artistic or intellectually sophisticated”. The catalogue is off to a great start (and looks as though it will provide some excellent ideas for my own work…), but is actively seeking user contributions. If you can think of a game that might meet the above requirements, head on over to the catalogue to submit it.

I’m not sure what to make of this, and I’m loath to give this man any sort of publicity, however minor. That said, there is no doubt that rather more well-read websites than this will jump on the opportunity to highlight the horrendous implication that someone like Breivik could ‘learn’ to kill using a video game.

A World of Warcraft wedding - while the MMORPG has been responsible for its fair share of marriages and divorces, it does not seem like a training ground for mass murderers.

I confess that Call of Duty, which Breivik claims to have used to “develop [his] target acquisition”, is not to my tastes but to suggest that it could be in some way responsible for what happened in Norway (as some quarters of the press seem to imply) is ridiculous. Breivik’s interest in the fantastical World of Warcraft is also dredged up, as if playing a game featuring orcs, gnomes and night elves could somehow prepare him for the very real and truly horrifying act of mass murder. That the 10 million other WoW subscribers aren’t using the game as some sort of murderous training simulator suggests that it has little to do with the actions of an evil, deluded man.